What is the world of conservative Christian homeschooling like?

A recent memoir in Salon painted a picture of cultic isolation and criminal parental negligence.

Author Leslie Patrick described a youth spent watching TV with her sister while her overworked mother slept.  They were told to stay away from windows so that the happy public-school children across the street wouldn’t witness their truancy.  They had some schoolbooks, but without parental guidance, Patrick and her sister spent their days curled up in front of the television instead.

The result?  No surprise.  When Patrick finally enrolled in a Christian school in tenth grade, she could not begin to keep up with the academic work.  Her natural shyness added to her “freak”-ish separation from the current fashions of teenagers in her school.  With good luck, Patrick reports, she somehow managed to survive her religious education and emerge “normal.”

Is this what Christian homeschooling is like?  As Patrick notes,

I realize that many of the nearly 2 million home-school students in the United States don’t have experiences like mine. They get sparkling educations, and come through the relative isolation with their social skills intact.

If this is the case, why do we find articles about religious-educational freakishness so compelling?

I wonder if a number of us liberals harbor deluded stereotypes about the world of Christian education.  The “secret” world of such intensely religious schools becomes an object of morbid fascination, a theological, cultural, and personal trainwreck from which we self-satisfied liberals cannot turn away.  This is why, perhaps, occasional glimpses like that of the recent “Bible dinosaur” quiz become such objects of fascination.  This is why, perhaps, the editors at Salon agreed to publish Patrick’s idiosyncratic expose.

My hunch is that the everyday world of the average Christian homeschooler is far too boringly mundane to ever rival the headline-grabbing allure of the “home-school freak.”  Nevertheless, in spite of Patrick’s belated acknowledgement of the real experience of “many” Christian homeschoolers, readers of her sad memoir are likely to come away with a skewed and misleading vision of conservative education.